by A. E. Lowan
She grimaced and nearly clapped her hand over her face. She just had to think that, didn’t she?
Etienne’s head turned left, the same direction Winter felt the pull of the rift. “That way,” she confirmed, refocusing on the task at hand. “I think it’s towards the back.” They made their way in the dim light around the outer wall, avoiding the fire teams making their way deeper into the factory, until at last they came to a line of doors along what looked to be the back wall. They stopped at one with a partial sign that read, “-age Room 3.” Winter could feel the rift beyond, a steady call of emptiness where the barrier between the realms had been ripped.
She brushed the backs of her fingers against the doorknob, tapping gingerly to gauge the temperature without committing to fully grasping what could be searing hot metal. “Blast,” she whispered as she snatched her hand back. The ward that provided protection from heat left her with no difficulties determining temperature. The doorknob was hot, but not branding.
Etienne pulled his hand back from testing the door itself, apparently coming to the same conclusion. “What now?” he asked.
Winter gave a small frown as she considered their options. It did not take her long; they really did not have any. The rift had to be sealed as soon as possible. With firefighters in the building the chances of one of them stumbling across it rose dramatically. While she had little sympathy for those humans who played with preternatural fire and got burned – she considered their present circumstances and took a second to appreciate the irony of that thought – she could not in good conscience allow the innocent to come to harm through her own inaction. Especially since these innocents were protectors of the innocent, themselves. “We go in,” she replied.
She dropped into a crouch, folding down as far as she could. Usually thoughtless about her nearly six feet of height, today was a day she wished for her sisters’ smaller frames. Both of them had inherited their Grandmother Bridget’s stocky Irish figure, neither being over 5’ 3” while she took after their tall fae mother. Etienne watched her with curiosity and then understanding lit his face. He shifted his sword to his left hand as he dropped down beside her. He pushed aside her hand as she reached forward with it insulated by her black felt coat sleeve. “Let me. I’m first in.”
She nodded and ducked her head down even further as he gripped the doorknob and twisted it open.
Heat and smoke came roaring out of the room, loosening curls from Winter’s bun as it blew them back and made the skin of her forehead feel desiccated even with the protection ward. She threw her arm over her face to protect it as the blast of hot wind whipped past, escaping into the cooler air of the factory, and then it was gone, the temperature and air pressure equalized between the two rooms. She rubbed her dry eyes and looked at Etienne, who was lowering his own arm and rising cautiously to meet whatever challenge waited in the storage room.
At some point the large room had been filled with racks. Winter could see the indentations on the concrete floor where they had been and drag marks gouged out from their removal, to whatever repurpose she could not guess. Now only a handful stood side by side at the far end of the room and that was where the heart of the fire blazed. Bolts of rotting fabric were stacked tight as cordwood, flames licking up the sides and roaring high, billowing smoke roiling in a low ceiling a few yards above their heads. Winter could see salamanders, their sinuous, flickering bodies winding in and out of gaps in the bolts. They were beautiful elementals, appearing as if all the colors flame could take swirled beneath their glassy hides; oranges and reds predominant, blues and whites and greens like ticking on fur. But she knew the lovely things would only be too happy to burn her to the bone and dance in her ashes. They were not malevolent; it was simply their nature. The only thing they feared was water, and would flee to their native plane as soon as the firefighters arrived with their hoses.
“What caused the fire?” Etienne asked, raising his voice over the roar of the flames. Within the confines of the storage room the noise was constant and loud. His eyes were also on the twining salamanders and his sword was back in his right hand, but it was not pointed at them. He apparently knew better than to threaten an elemental with a weapon.
Winter moved further into the dry, heated air of the room, sweating under her felt coat but keeping it on to protect her skin. “There must have been a gas line running under the building. The power surge both ruptured it and sparked the explosion. Something similar happened during the San Francisco earthquake in the 1900’s.”
Etienne nodded, his face grave. “I remember. The whole city burned down.”
Towards the back of the storage room it looked like someone had given up on order and simply threw random junk into the corner, maybe around the time the factory closed down. Shelving units rested on their sides and at angles against each other and a stack of crates that towered up into the undulating ceiling of smoke had partially collapsed, leaving shattered wood and machine parts scattered across the floor. Winter looked over the chaos and then gave out a small cry of shock. There was the rift, so large her eyes had wandered over it twice before seeing it for what it was.
She was used to seeing natural rifts as cracks or holes in walls, never more than a foot or two in diameter. She knew that theoretically they could be bigger. The Gate in the basement of Other World Books, while not a rift, stretched to the ceiling and was wide enough for two people to walk through side by side. But rifts were just tears in the fabric between worlds.
This was one heck of a tear.
The storage locker was taller than Winter and tilted at an angle, its one door swinging wide open. Beyond lay a chasm of darkness ringed by cold orange flames. With all the fire she had at first taken it for yet another burning.
Etienne let out a low whistle of appreciation. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen one that big.”
She turned to face him. “That’s the largest I’ve ever seen.”
He shook his head. “They’ve gotten smaller with the Age of Iron, but there was once a time when Faerie and the Mortal Realm actually overlapped in places. This is nothing, just a rift filling an opening. The first one I passed through when I was very young filled a valley; I came to the Mortal Realm by accident in my wandering.” He shrugged. “Decided to stay a while.”
She heard an echo of something in his voice, but it was too faint to identify. “How long ago was that?”
He hesitated a moment. “Six hundred mortal years.”
The echo was pain and Winter felt the part of herself that could read the soul instinctively try to open, to want to find the source of the pain so she could soothe it, but she willed it closed. If he wanted to share it with her, she would listen, but his hesitation told her that it was private and she did not know him well enough to pry. She had seen enough on her first search of his soul to know he hurt, but it was not a hurt for her to heal. That was sufficient. So she moved the conversation along and stepped forward, picking her way through the debris to the locker. “So, I know this was caused by the surge we felt earlier and it’s not the only one,” she cringed internally at how her day was shaping up, “even if it is the biggest. Why now? After six hundred years, why do we have surges and a monster rift?” Sweat ran in a stinging line into her eyes and she wiped it away with her coat sleeve. Her skin felt tight in the heat and she began to worry a little about the wards. They could be overwhelmed by too much of whatever they protected against if they weren’t strong enough, and her specialty was potions, not wards.
She looked back to see Etienne moving away from her, using his left hand to move shelving units aside so he could search behind them. Moisture beaded up and ran down his face, but he seemed to ignore it. “Wild magic is common in Faerie,” he replied, and bent to poke the tip of his sword under a tipped shelf. “And it’s my experience that rifts in the Mortal Realm connect with Faerie in some way or another.”
Winter stood before the utter darkness of a rift between the realms that rose above her head and
swallowed down a fleeting sense of vertigo. She was not going to fall forward and through it. Resolute, she dug into her bag and pulled out the spell chalk. Nine glyphs in the seal. “Actually, rifts can and do open up to anywhere.” She looked the locker up and down, planning out the positioning of the glyphs as she took on her teaching tone.
He gave a small snort. “Does all of your experience tell you that?”
She snapped to attention and turned to where he continued his search. “Well, that was patronizing,” she said, her voice tart.
He glanced back at her and gave her that twist of his mouth. “I do have a thousand years on you, and every rift I’ve ever passed through has either taken me here or back to Faerie.”
She narrowed her eyes, face flushed with more than the heat, and turned back to her task, but kept talking. “I’m a wizard with access to the largest House library in the world and I’ve done a little reading. I’ve also been sealing rifts since I was twelve and began my apprenticeship working in the clinic with Aunt Curiosity saving lives when I was fourteen, because all other hands were needed to keep this city together.” She finished the first glyph and shot over her shoulder, “I may be only twenty-four, but I seal at least one, sometimes three or four rifts a week and then clean up the mess. Many of those messes are not caused by fae. If you do the math, Etienne Knight, that means I’ve seen, sealed, and banished the results of more rifts in twelve years than you could have possibly hopped through in your lauded thousand.”
Etienne raised his free hand in surrender. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Winter turned back to the locker and began drawing the second glyph, cold orange flames licking at her hand. Sweat was running down her spine and she could feel the fabric of her dress cling to her skin. “Erik already treats me like a child. I don’t need you to start, too.” She loved the vampires like family, but a drawback to loving immortals, in her mind, was that they, especially Erik, would always see her in pigtails. In the end, if she had a mortal lifespan she would be a mere episode in theirs. It made earning their respect that much more difficult.
She heard his voice behind her. “I’m sorry. Bess always said I’m an ass when I’m edgy.”
Grateful for a change in subject, she asked, “Bess?”
The silence thickened with the smoke above their heads, until she finally named the glyph to set it and turned to face the faerie knight. He was not looking around anymore. Instead he watched the smoke at the top of the tower of crates.
“What’s wrong?”
He held up two fingers on his free hand for silence and strode over to the tower, tension singing through his body. He pressed his shoulder to the tower and shoved, and Winter could feel him pulling at the magic in his gun rig again. The crates groaned, tilted, and over the crackling of burning fabric and cracking wood she heard gibbering cries of panic.
They weren’t alone in the room.
Etienne backed up and rammed his shoulder against the teetering tower, causing it to rock violently, and three bodies were launched from the concealment of the smoke-shrouded top crate to the concrete floor. Etienne put himself between them and Winter, concealing her and leading with his sword, and spoke to them in lilting Faerie Gaelic as they scrambled to their feet.
They were all three thick-bodied in a uniform way that made determining gender impossible, a little over five feet tall, and so filthy that the rags they dressed in were the same patchy gray tones as their lumpy skin. All three bore blackened axes with viciously jagged edges, as if their smith had forged them with sadism in his heart. The only color they wore were their floppy, slightly pointed hats, dyed in uneven shades of deep rusty brown.
Memory tugged at her for a moment and it was the color that dragged it to the surface. She knew that color well – it was dried blood. These were redcaps, a particularly violent breed of fae that was known to dye their hats in the spilled blood of their enemies. One pulled his soot-blackened rags down from where they had covered his nose and mouth in the smoke and replied to Etienne in a voice like grinding gravel, using his axe to gesture at the crates and the locker. How they could be the same language, Winter did not know. There was no lilt, no grace to his words, only aggression.
Etienne spoke again, gesturing with his free hand toward the locker and stepping aside to give them a free path while keeping his sword up in a defensive posture. Winter moved with him and the three snapped their attention to her, black eyes glittering as they wandered over how the sweat made her dress cling to her thighs in a way that made her think automatically of all three as male. The one on the right elbowed the speaker and rumbled something and the speaker made a noise that may have been a laugh. Whatever it was it made Winter pull her coat closer about herself in the heat of the room, feeling suddenly unclean. The exchange was not lost on Etienne, who spoke sharply and gestured this time with a sweep of his steel-edged sword. Winter made out a single word: “Unseelie.”
Again memory from long hours of childhood study in her family library surfaced and she knew why the redcaps looked at her with such predatory speculation. In the Unseelie Courts, the courts of the dark fae, the strong ruled while the weak sought protection or were preyed upon. She had read rumors of gangs of fae wandering the halls of the subterranean courts, looking for victims with no patrons to protect them. It did not matter that she was a woman – the redcaps would have given her the exact same regard if she had been a young man. They may even have looked at Etienne that way, had he been less forceful. It was that she was unarmed and looked weak, sick – like easy meat. She looked like a sidhe woman, vulnerable and tempting. And they thought Etienne was her patron. This was nothing about desire and everything about power. The look in their eyes clearly said, “We could rape what is yours and there is nothing you could do about it.”
The three redcaps leaned into each other, rumbling, eyes moving from her to Etienne and back again. She knew that look, that blossoming confidence, had seen it many times from the edges of therian gatherings just before the explosion of a dominance fight. They thought they could take Etienne. If they could, she was easy game for them. She might be able to surprise one with a banishing potion, but all three… Her heart began to race and she backed away from all four males as she heard Etienne grind out, “Merde,” through gritted teeth and then blow out a steadying breath. She kept moving the short distance until stopped by the back wall. She was a noncombatant and had no business being in the field of battle. She felt Etienne pull on the magic of the gun rig and he was no longer standing there.
Winter had grown up preternatural and as such had seen more violence, or the results of it, in her life than most humans. On TV and in the movies fights were long, lasting several minutes and often covering a great deal of ground as choreographers and directors drew out as much drama from their storytelling as they could. But in reality, fights could be as short as a matter of seconds and as simple as the first one to make a mistake was the one bleeding their life out on the floor. That was when humans fought. Vampires moved faster than her wizard eyes could track, and therian, while stronger, were not much slower. She had never seen a sidhe fight; she had been inside that morning talking with Katherine instead of watching Etienne with Cian, and Cian had only been learning for six years – he could be expected to be slower. Before her now she could see what a millennia of experience looked like up against three vicious opponents.
Redcaps were foot soldiers and mercenaries and when not kept busy they turned to raiding. These three moved as a unit, converging on Etienne as he drove into them in a blur of speed and violence, and just that fast their attempt at unity exploded into chaos. Forced to slow to meet the three counter attacks, Winter could actually see his movements. Etienne met the leader’s axe with a parry of his sword, the sound of the two very different metals clanging with strange dissonance. His left foot connected with the thick body of one and he let the motion of both the parry and the kick carry him around, grabbing up the third redcap by a fistful of
rags with his left hand and propelling him with his full sidhe strength into the piles of burning fabric.
The redcap began screaming his horror even before the salamanders set on him.
Etienne was moving again before the redcap ignited, not even bothering to look back, and brought the mortal steel edge of his blade down in a vicious arch meant to split the redcap leader’s head in two. It was barely parried in time and fresh blood soaked his cap and ran in a rivulet into one of his eyes.
Slapping wildly at the salamanders writhing over his charred body, the screaming redcap behind Etienne pulled himself from the fallen bolts and flames. Winter’s skin tightened at how much agony he must be in, or perhaps redcaps were made of tougher fiber than others. She reached into her bag and pulled out one of the bright blue banishing potions. Whether she was trying to get it away from Etienne before it brought its flaming horror of a body into the fight, or trying to save herself from watching it struggle, she was not sure. Either way, she moved into a good position to throw the small glass bottle and tried something she had never done before. She threw the potion bottle with all the strength she had.
It reached the redcap’s burning body and bounced off soft fabric and flesh.